There's a new episode of my Raw Game Design podcast up for my ($10+) patrons, here. This podcast series is part of my thank you to all those who support my various projects on Patreon. That same podcast link also has links to all the other episodes of Raw Game Design too, btw.

In this episode, I discuss an advanced kind of fighting game AI for the upcoming Fantasy Strike fighting game (playable builds for that available for higher tier patrons, btw). The twist about this AI discussion is that the trouble here is really all about the way we present it, and that's heavily tied to the in-game menus. Which modes even exist? How are they arranged? This menu stuff is incredibly hard in the first place and the prospect of amazing AI calls into question a bunch of things we might have taken for granted before.

This is "raw game design" in the truest sense in that we are lost in the forest here. Since recording this I have at least slightly more idea what to do and I think we were barely starting to head in the right direction by the end.

I also do a separate podcast series, Sirlin on Game Design, which is free for everyone and generally more polished. The Raw Game Design series is intentionally unpolished and gives a glimpse at what it's really like to work on design problems.